TRH pt 3: The Magic Flight
by teddybowties
Summary: Benjamin Pond -the Eleventh Doctor- is pregnant with a child who is not a child, a woman called Flamina who is the Master's fiance and supposed heir to the reviled House Paradox. While trolling the entirety of Gallifrey for their own good, he will avoid boredom, unmask some hidden truths, and lead Jack Harkness on a not so merry chase...
1. Chapter 1

Chapter One: Somewhere, My Love

In the depths of ever-smouldering Gallifrey, a green light blinks. A mechanism whirs. A sheet of metal with bumps on it raises, preparing itself to be interpreted by the surrounding machines like some monstrous music box spool.

Chime chime chime-chime

Chime chime chime chime chime-chime

Chime chime chime chime

Chime chime chime chime chime-chime

Chime chime chime-chime

chime chime chime chime chime-chime

E G C1 E1

B D1 C1 G F# F

F G A B

A G F# G F1 E1

E G C1 E1

B A G# G D1 C1

The great reflectors, those aged mirrors of validium set in secret by the Other, are creaking into place like grand old parlour doors with rusted hinges, dancing in pirouette on turntables in the dusty dark. They are awakening, preparing to collect two people, to fling them far away and over a great many hills. And those hills are like waves on a sea of darkness, they crest and dip and sway and tumble under, over, through and between. The quantum ocean flows in those waves. Up and down they fly, in a breezy slam of keys out of sight beneath the lid of a Concert Grand. Or is it a Baby? No, only a Spinet for now.

In time, once they both wake up… perhaps a Pianola by the seashore. Yes, he is still sleeping, waiting. He had to take her inside himself, no other way. He doesn't regret that, at least. Will never do so. To hell with Time.

And it is about Time, the Mirrors muse as they bounce the Lord and his Granddaughter's Nurse around between them. The pair will reach their destination soon enough, a dry place stuffed with markets and stalls filled with every sort of sundry.

It is about Time.

Suddenly, their great sharp-bellied lump of stumblebum and his raisined major domo are crumpled into sharp edges, like a paper ball, and thrown through a reddish doorway onto the fine grey sand of…

The Mirrors decide they'll have no more to do with these two- the agreement is met. So long have they waited, so long have they knelt in slabs of unmoving metal that they step from their moorings in the ancient stone floor and descend immediately on naked feet and naked limbs and trunk of glinting life, consumed by a longing for the sights of younger places. They fancy a trip, a spree, a lengthy family vacation. A relaxing getaway.

Although, to lessen the chance of being stolen again, they will, collectively, avoid Museums.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two: You Can Get What At Which Restaurant?

"Certainly, Mister Plombkins, I'll take care of it." the willowy humanoid office girl drones.

It's a skin joint, like any other skin joint, Jack tells himself as he opens the double doors and walks toward her. Stainless steel rats abound in a place like this, it's all the same. Cages of silver and steel and shiny baubles with mouths and teeth and needs. And the most fun of all- the attraction of exotic financial runs in the pantyhose. Remembering how hard it was to get the information that led him to this place, he's beginning to lose hope that the man he's looking for isn't anything but what he wants him to be, a white mouse among the vermin.

And she's a tall order, whose slim lines radiate a special kind of chill in that grey silk and those sharp shoulders, the kind you take up to the office and bury in the paperwork. The kind you don't take home to your mother unless you want to get your ass hitched to a star. He's got his own star now- no time for trifles.

Still… he doesn't mind looking. He could use some information, after all.

Her thigh hugs the desk in a tight smoky pencil skirt. Endless legs claw down to the bluish grey carpet in sheaths of tawdry taupe. The seams are classic, easing blatantly up the backs of her calves in dark pinches of coffee. They stir in Jack's hindbrain a vague sense of need, a sudden urge to go free-climbing up a sheer cliff. He hasn't done that in ages.

However, the scent of morning roses is cloying, like a crinolin veil cushioned in her modestly piled brown hair. He watches her instead.

Her eyes are almond-color, he thinks as he makes a show of inhaling her scent, half-circling and walking and pawing around her little castle, re-arranging the furniture with his eyes.

"Is this the managing desk? I have this card." Between two fingers, Jack holds up the white business card Benjamin left on his pillow that first time, trying not to think of how he steam cleans it and keeps it under glass between the pages of old books, to preserve the man's scent. The almond gaze crawls over the stiff paper like a big brown spider, fangs just hidden behind what that icy, sculptured throat dragged in.

The card reads, in simple lowercase black:

le•lapin•blanc

cnalb•nipal•el ϿϾ le•lapin•blanc

Le Lapin Blanc, and two stylised e's for the company name, Elegant Egotist. Elegant.

"Ah, yes- the White Rabbit. One of our best telepaths." The suet-grey lips curl in a frosty smile; she understands. It's business as usual, then. "He's away at the moment. I'll offer you another, shall I? My name, for convenience, is Prydonia. Sometimes Mister Plombkins calls me… no. You can't call me that."

Jack glares. "Let me guess… Nostalgia?"

Her highball, hourglass waist twists like the rotor blades on a boat engine as though she's about to hook an arm around him and lead him down the garden path for some iced black coffee, but instead, she plucks a card from the white milk glass dish on the legless silver table, this one black with a single blue circle cut by a gold line. Her black-spine eyelashes never fall. They've fallen too much already.

"Try this one; he's another minimalist. You know how hands-on they can be."

She holds it up to the dim round lights, then flats her hand into Jack's coat.

"Thanks, sweetheart, but I'm working… you know how it is," he murmurs, grabbing her hand and easing it away from his trousers. Her fingers are minus the card, of course. Ha. Mister Plombkins had probably been on the comm the whole time. Never mix poker and dancing.

With a nod and a wink, Jack backs out of the office building's three-storey tall double glass doors, heading out again into Mnrva's red light district of crystal towers and giant stuffed bears eating ramen with their paws. It reminds him of 23rd century Tokyo. He smiles.

On the floating sidewalk, standing in the sunny glare of the asteroid's artificial imported lighting, he digs the scribbly note from that Ood, Phillip Cake, out of his pocket.

It says:

Sometimes

Nostalgia comes looking

for you.

On a whim, Jack checks the blue card.

Okay.

There's something written on the back of it, in a spidery hand. He knows Prydonia, or Nostalgia, whatever her name is, didn't have time to write anything. Unless the whole thing was staged by the man upstairs.

For a good time, try

The Unicorn.

His eyes cross the thin silver street and find a building covered with greasy neon and too many little black scratches on classic white brick, like old shrine wards.

Is that supposed to be hanzi? he wonders as he reaches to push in the door, stuffing a cigarette in his mouth with his free hand. No; it can't be an authentic dive miniscoped from Old Earth; all the little papers read the same quote:

我已經做了... ...值得商榷的事情。

Hastily he jots the translation on the back of his hand as he considers the name of the place.

The Unicorn, huh? Someone's a movie buff.

He sticks his dark boot in the door, catching it as a swaggering, youngish Cyclopian walks out, swaying, a blue bulb of something sloshing brightly in its hand, and more on a loose grey suit two sizes too large.

"Hey there, Grinchy," Jack says, steadying the man with an arm as he picks his pocket for an ident, which he finds- a slim silver card punched sixteen times with little holes.

Grinchy's obviously a heavy, judging by the extra bulk and the bulge of a firearm poking from under a half-tucked pink shirt.

A regularly sloshed heavy, too- that pink shirt is splashed with at least fifteen different kinds of liquor. The pissy stench of blue ale is un-missable.

So Jack gets a good look, memorising the details he needs to get inside, then replaces the card back inside the man's rumpled suit with a quick grab on the arse.

Speaking of poker and dancing…


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three: Auld Lang Syne

Spices linger.

Dark.

Savoury.

Sweet and pungent.

Light.

Old fingers probe a stomach, as though the swollen flesh were a pocket full of the best rye.

There is a jar full of crunchy turquoise colored leaves. A veil of dried apple grass.

A ring of thick Quilylonian turnips, yellow-green and fat, hangs from a low wooden beam darkened by stains.

So many stains.

Her fingers touch his prostrate form and feel along his flesh.

"I knew you for so long," she murmurs, taking a moment to stare at his face and brush his hair with her bony fingers. "…but you did not know me, almost, though it has been only a short time since you left your granddaughter with me and told us to run. It is a conundrum, to be sure!"

Weaving her thin elbows underneath his head, she settles his limp upper body at her breast and twists slightly so that he leans back into the crook of her arm.

Then she places one of those hands inside her greyish belt pouch and pounces about. She is searching for Arkytior's old wooden spoon. After some digging, her hands grasp the smooth polished stem of the eating utensil. She folds her palm over it, takes it out from her pouch and sets it to the stark grey-wood bowl she found earlier in the spatial cupboards.

From the bowl's circular confines, the stifling aroma of meat stew wafts up- it's rare young Dornbeast mostly, plus some yellow waxy vegetables, the greyish meat having been chunked and marinated with just a dash of pepper and sautéed in mineral-rich Telachtian fish oil. The eyes of the Dornbeast, containing the metal Bizmuth, an elemental ingredient in Gallifreyan vitamins, have been dried, salted and stuffed with a tasty berry wine cheese of white color called Furlishke.

"If you don't wake up I won't be saving your portion, sweet one." She cackles as she cups his chin and forces his mouth open. "Every child I have reared has eaten for me eventually, and you are no different. I know you can hear me, though you walk the Great Land, so open your mouth and feed that little bud of yours!"

The sleeping man is pale against her chest. But the tight cloth bandage she wove around his side is not so soaked through as she thought it might be; it shows only a small patter of vermillion now, rather than the great wet splotch of yesterday that stained the under-rug. Still, the dark crescent bruises beneath his shut eyes have failed to disappear.

Singing to herself a little hymn, she sets the full and sloshing spoon to his lips, which lag, then open just enough.

"That is fine, my Lord! A little further and we shall have all this good supper down your gullet where it belongs! I haven't stocked us this well for it all to go to waste on a lazybones…"

Then, as she watches, his jaw slips down, and he is blinking bleary green jewels on the floor of the house.

Her hand flies forward, and soon his mouth is shut again, only this time his teeth close reflexively on a wooden spoon full of…

"Oh, thatsh… thatsh… thatsh damn good!" he yammers, speaking around the spoon with some difficulty as he rolls his tongue around, curling the muscle around and over and through every bit of meat and vegetable. He savours every drop of broth with closed eyes and a humming sound made deep in the back of the nose-mouth passage.

She raises her hand and thwacks his hair with a quick slap. "Watch your language! I won't have that child learning your foul habits!"

The injured man just stares, dangling the spoon from his lips like a confused pack animal.

"You're Mamlaurea!" he manages with narrowed eyes after choking down that first big monstrous bite.

Then his hand smacks to his forehead, leaving a red palm print and two crossed eyes.

"Ow- that was stupid of me; I'm still weak from Kenny's mission statement." he groans, setting the spoon down shakily back into the bowl perched in her frumpy fingers, albeit as he sways like a reformed teetotaler atop his pile of rugs and pillows.

When he trusts himself enough to open his eyes again, she is still there, holding the bowl in one hand and waiting, unsmiling but bright eyed as a shark in her silks of yellow and grey. "Harumph! Dense as always and full of talk! As if I could be anyone but your loyal nurse, old fool! Rest yourself. The food will keep indefinitely; the notion of this place was your whim, after all."

He laughs then, heartily and wide and high. And for her, his flighty peridot eyes hold the welcome sparkle of spring water. "You know, you haven't faded a bit since then, you sweet old thing..." he breathes, reaching out to cup her wrinkled brown face, and then his face darkens as he considers the question he must ask her.

His shoulders slump. He takes a sagging breath, then opens his mouth. "Do you know what year it is on Gallifrey right now?"

The old nurse stiffens and stares, turning her neck on its collar like a questioning bird. "My Lord Other, have we bruised our head as well?"

He stabs out with an elbow, grabbing her chin, immobilising her entire body with just one feather touch on a pressure point.

Her lovely grey eyes spiral wide and she freezes. But she does not flinch.

"Think, woman!" he cries, panting as the wound breaks open again and bleeds, forcing too much orange-red into the nice puddle of colorful fabric goods she's made into a bed for him. Then suddenly he is seething at silent space, remembering gentleness only when the first sob of many escapes her lips. She sags, a sack in his hand even as he loosens his grip on her jawbone.

"Might you a modicum of forgiveness, loyal my Mam… I have been ill for a long time and have just begun to recover. But I need to know what year you think it is. And after that I'll sleep again. So please?" he whispers it, holding her against his own chest now as she shivers and trembles like new leaves on a winter tree.

"The last year of the Dark passed not two centuries ago, my poor master," she squeaks, sniffling into his clothes as he pets her straggle-haired, balding pate.

"It is not, Mamlaurea. So much time has passed since your teleport failed to transmit and became stuck. It is the Restoration, now. The Dark Times have been gone for at least a millennia, and I…"

What is this now? No quivering lip, no shine of the eye rolling unconscious down a red, wrinkled cheek? Perhaps she is all right with it, then. She's playing it stalwart, then… his shriveled old apple doll from the good old days.

"And you, my Lord?"

He sighs and eases back down onto the rugs and pillows, and shuts his eyes against the thin veil of light from the overhead lamps full of oil.

She goes to him after a year of moments passed between eyes and the wall, and sets her face against his chest, finally to be comforted by the rise of his two hearts, and says nothing.

"… I jumped into the Loom to escape the assassins, knowing I was going to my death. And I was reborn. I'm called the Doctor now… but I remember… all the fragments of myself were scattered like seeds within that great machine-but they came together again. Now let me sleep. I'll consume that lovely stew of yours later. Be sure and save me some of the cheese, eh?"

As the Doctor sinks away under the settling fog of his thoughts, the old nurse cracks her knuckles one by one, reveling in the only familiarity left, the touch of one's own skin. She sets herself down on her knees by his side before the banquet she's brought to bear, as if preparing to feast. And then she wails, crying out her confusion with silent lips, that her soundless screams might reach the heavens of this new, strange era, and be heard.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter Four: Reed Boats for Wet Egyptians

There is a man at the bar, Jack notes. The man's delicate back sports a Victorian jacket, velvet, green maybe. Or blue. It's hard to tell at this distance with all the smoke. A lit cigarillo peeks from one side of the dark strawberry-blonde curls. The smooth, wiry shoulders are seals about to slip into the water, slumped and obfuscated, as though their owner hates himself.

Cut to the piano in the darkest corner of the long, disarranged room full of knocked over chairs and floor-bound drinkers. Long fingers leap into the strains of Satie again. A creamy camel trench settles across shoulders that are slightly wide and tensed and slumped, as though the piano man's muscles are aching to play anywhere but here, despite the reek of surety aching from the keys, and so Gymnopédie 1 sallies forth, undaunted.

But then, Jack reasons, his eyes flipping back toward the Victorian gent at the bar, pianists always seem that way.

"Jack Harkness?"

Jack feels a chill again, that warmth he gets as though someone's poured bourbon down his spine.

"Jack Harkness, you can come over here now. I'm not going to bite. As if I ever could again. As if I never had before. As if I never will, over and over. As if… oh, it doesn't matter. Come here. Sit." A hand taps on the short stool beside the speaker.

Yes, it's the man with the curls, the Victorian gent. His eyes widening, Jack uses the thirty seconds of walking it takes to reach the bar to get a bead on the man's temperament from the way he's sitting. But it all falls away when that face reaches up like an abandoned puppy, sick and wet, and just… pulls at him, droopy damp curls like old springs rusted by the kiss of rain, all bounced and stuck and crusted around a porcelain gaze as old and young as any clock worth admiring, set with two blue stones that bleed. Two blue stones- it doesn't do Him justice, really… Imagine an ocean begging for recognition from a dead horse? Drink Me! Drink me… please? Drink me? And they say you can't make them drink.

The Time Agent finds himself transfixed, floating in his own head as though he's never been in anyone else's.

"Hey there, honey," Jack manages finally, pressing a hand across the contours of the man's lithe, slightly bony runner's back and rubbing circles. "You look like you could use…"

But a finger tip presses against his lips, and then lips press there too, cramming something inside so Jack is robbed of speech- a blunted tongue, bloated by blackened promises… it feels like.

"Don't bother," says Victorian Coat even as he smushes his mouth harder against Jack's then pulls away, "…the piano player sent me, the manipulative sod. I think I hate him, except that he's pregnant, and I'm fairly certain he didn't hate me." He turns to the man at the piano- the oddball is still wearing his long creamy coat colored of camel… at least he was when he… "Two, no… three miracles in one night. I shall have to think further on't. Good day, Wrong weather, Captain! Don't bother following me- my memory doesn't!"

Just like that, the wet and angry dog becomes a boy again and fades away out of doors into the night, leaving Jack dizzy on a bar stool, wondering why and what, and how the hell.

Then , his half-diverted bead on the piano player, Jack sticks a hand in his mouth to soothe the stung muscle as he scrambles from his seat toward the big black and white piano in the back. The sound of a supply door swinging clambers like reason up the backs of the legs of his ears, and he sighs as he reaches for the sheet of music sitting demure on the stand above the keys.

But as he holds it up to the dim round lights in the ceiling, it's only then he realizes.

There was no music. But the bench is warm to the touch. –He- was here, playing… from memory.

Jack looks down at the sheet of paper he's retrieved. The edges feel smooth; there's weight to the paper, too, like Old Earth vellum.

It's an ad for a job offer…

Rare Antiquities Museum

Applicants needed for Security Detail

The Indsø Tys in Fortescue Sector

Mnrva


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter Five: In a Man's Womb

Crash.

Crash.

Flash of white.

Relinquish.

Escape me.

I need you.

Don't break me.

What is this?

The words pile around her wet form.

She is drawn in the damp sand.

She is nothing but lines.

Soon a shadow falls over her, a blanket of cool precision.

Soft.

Caring emanates from the dark of the covering.

Scritch-scritch.

Rustle.

Remembering roughness, she realises, belatedly, that it is a coat.

A tweed coat.

Words and letters lap around her bare feet. They are the water here. They are the breath. They are the sea-life, and the sand. There is rocky white land beyond the surf; but the ocean has cast no denizens up from its depths onto the calm, calm shore.

When she opens her eyes, she is not blinded; instead, a figure sits blocking the harshest of the light, a triangle of form. Contrapposto, but for the crouching. Waiting.

Thinker.

The man-shadow's peridot eyes glitter like their namesake stones, saying something like, "I believe this is yours. I had to swallow it, to save your life. It was all that was left of... well, of you."

There is something in the hands. The fists loosen like silk ribbons spilled from a table… the fingers, squarish, longish, only partially manicured, they wrap around a...

Roundish…

There is a point on the bottom, where the roundness tapers. It pricks her thumb when she picks the thing up.

It has a thick cap on top, where a… small curved stem rests.

It is glinting in the light.

All of it.

Glinting.

She looks down; another word floats nearer, sliding in with the tide.

Obol.

"Obol?"

The man-shadow shakes his head and a soft curve of his lips regards her, playful.

"Marron. Some people call it an acorn. It's a type of nut."

She stares at him. Her hand falls back with the… nut in it. She stares out at the water throwing alphabets and equations up on the beach. She pitches the nut away from her, over the wide waves.

The man just laughs, a soundless sound. His shoulders lift and fall in endless little fits of mirth. His arms fly out; he spins and falls back on the fine, unending white grains of mineral stone and glass.

He lies there a while, then his finger sticks itself up and points to her feet again, waving his limbs back and forth in the sand like a…

The words snow and angel are flowing and floating around her long toes like seaweed caught on a shoal.

Snow angel.

"Back to sleep, my little Flamme," the man murmurs, and suddenly she feels a weight drift over her, in low-hanging veils of fog. "… now is not the time for a forest fire. Sleep now."

Her eyes depart from the light. From the sun overhead. From everything but the surf and the sea, and the chalky clay-silt scent of the sand.

Her fingers roll open beside her, new leaves on a fern.

The water runs over her fingertips, carrying with it a golden object that settles into her palm.

Marron.

Two hands pull the tweed coat over her, till they are sure she sleeps. She does.

Then the triangle shadow resumes his post at the head of her, to vigil again. Like a blackbird.

But first, he reaches over his charge and slips the golden acorn under her head, for sweet dreams, combing out her long white locks so they spread like poured cream across the white ground.

His shirt is folded under her white hair, wrapped with his red suspenders; it makes a comfy pillow.

"And now, Alice, for our first lesson," he says, settling down into the sand his seat, "I shall tell you of four girls who sought a bird's nest…"


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter Six: Camera Lucida

Future memory- also, a flashback.

"Are you ever going to put that damn thing down?" he murmurs to her, adjusting the thing that he hides his face with. A line of reddish-orange trails down his flawless cheek where the side of the mask has cut into him, so perfect is its fitting to his face. His bared lower jawline rounded but firm, a bit sharp at the tip of the chin, but not too much, slides into her palm, the man of that auspicious bone nuzzling her fingers like one of the three-toed hind from the Northern Forest.

She hoods her eyes against the double-lights of their homeworld's twin suns, then laughs and pulls long hands away again. "No. You gave it to me. I would sooner sell the sun."

The man frowns, a grinning catshark upside down, his thin lips quirking as she flows from dance to dance.

"I did not. Give that. To you. Fail to succour me again and I may have to take measures."

Her smooth body has been dancing in the daylight like this for hours. He has watched her for all of them.

A stone is in her hand, an unblemished egg-shaped stone on a small silver chain. Her silhouette catches it afire in the gleam of sunny daytime, and those fires leap from it, in licks of grass and egg yolk, of cloud and citrine and sky, of moonbeams and starshadow. Shafts of rainbow, they pour from her opening arms as she clutches the jewel to her white silked bosom and laughs at him where he sits still on the dark red grass.

"I should have father paint a picture of us- he'd enjoy that," she says, parting her lips in another laugh that rings the hills with silver. Then her violet eyes fall on him- it's like being washed in purple nacre, just in time for the Second Sunrise. "… and I should never fail to succour you. We are perfect, you and I, you liar. Be still- it is adored and in its place. Did father give it to you?"

As his father's sunset of lavender petals falls on the two of them in a pleasant rain of purple, he lies back in the red and ruby and garnet blades of soft grass and gazes at her laughing, grinning, pirouetting self, and fancies that his love is a statue carved of pearl, spinning in a music box ballet.

"Oui, ma' peche, oui…" he admits after a moment, feeling his mouth muscles rebel in a smile despite his best efforts to remain bearish.

His fingers drift along the edges of the thing on his face. Allowing himself to laugh at long last, he pulls it off.


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter Seven: Eat Me, Drink Me

"Mister Benjamin!"

"Mister Benjamin!"

"Oh?" says the tall man in a creamy camel coat, whose long hand rests on a slightly bulging stomach. Green gem eyes arrest on the sight of several small humans running toward him. "Oh my… are these… are these children? May… may I pet one?"

"Pet… of course you may, Benjamin. But the Doctor just picks them up and says hello." says the curly-haired woman in the burgundy dress and ready smile. His wife, Emily.

One girl runs to Benjamin's outstretched hand, her blond curls bouncing. Another child, a boy with deep black hair in a spiky cut and blue eyes like clouds, goes at a leap and climbs the man's leg like it's the French Alps. A third, ginger with grey eyes like a cat's, just tugs at the hem of Benjamin's coat, a scuffed up old teddy dangling from his free hand. Three more little girls, one dark-skinned with black hair, and two pale, one whose dark hair is dyed yellow and one whose hair is a ginger brush fire, all dressed in bunched white pinafores, skip up on either side of a blonde boy with bloody hands in a silver bear mask; all three clasp hands around Benjamin's other leg and hang on.

And there are more where they came from. A girl with dark eyes and long brown curls steps up with an abacus tattooed on her shift. A dark-haired boy with a gold star near his chest stands near her with another dark-haired girl in an air hostess cap, while a little blond girl in a blue sailing uniform sits and grins brightly at Pond's feet, a miniature spyglass in her hand. Two boys with curly hair join her, one in a long striped scarf, the other in a dark coat of green velvet. Next, a girl with a brown flip and a pencil on her ear, holding hands with a gap-toothed blonde. A boy in a rainbow coat with unruly mopsy curls of gold. Another boy with a black bowl cut, clutching a recorder. Yet another male child, with shoulder-length white locks over an old black coroner's coat, leans on a wall beside a close-shaven boy in a dark grey jumper and another boy wearing dark curls beneath a fetching panama.

More tiny footsteps follow; however…

There is one boy, just standing there, his soft brown hair sticking up and down and everywhere else with little care to the fox-shaped paste-colored clay mask obscuring his face.

"So he does," Benjamin Pond says softly. Then he reaches out for the boy in the clay kitsune mask, smiling down at him.

"Liar!" cries the boy, falling back from Benjamin's hand in a heap.

But another boy catches him, a tall boy with spiky brown hair and glasses and freckles.

"Yep and Nope." spiky-hair says, popping the p. "It's wake-y up time, sleepy head!"

Jack wakes to the sound of bopping in the next seat. The Januvian wing-beast obviously found someone to shack up with. But he doesn't want to listen in; a first.

The sounds of the hover- train come to life just as he does.

Bing bing. Tuweet! Bing bing. Tuweet!

Somebody's phone going off. Or an artificial organ needing a recharge.

Bump-crash. Ploomp, slosh.

One of the on-site vendors, carrying drinking bags full of sweet yellow, orange or pink juice just like on the sardine-tin travel buses of Old Earth's South America.

Dingbat-ting! Smash bump.

The arrival bell- the train's almost at the stop.

Currrrrr-unch-ting ting. Swing-grunk-grunk.

The train's auto-brakes, swerving to avoid one of the giant flying squirrels out for a bit of sky time, logging hours.

Woosh, woosh.

A door to the next car opening and closing.

Wooooooosh. Shik-shik-shik.

The whirring rush of the train's hover-capable lift-tracks.

Zing-pop.

Someone opening a vintage can of orange soda in the next seat.

A crumpling fills his ears, and the scent of thick paper welcomes the day to his nostrils.

His hand opens, belatedly; it seems he's balled the flier in his sleep.

At least he'll be there soon. Any inquiries can wait until he knows…


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter Eight: Pinkie

His yellow-grey ash wood door, in its infinite... door-ness… is imprinted with good old Book Antiqua below a dapper, frosted pane of smartly-dimpled glass. The typeset, on a polished bronze nameplate with Victorian edges, reads:

Georgie M. Plombkins

President

Elegant Egotist Escort Services

Main Offices

"Mister Plombkins, Sir." Nostalgia Prydonia Anno, the secretary, calls, reaching and balling a fist above the knob to knock.

Her rap tap-taps at the corner of the door.

Her knuckles graze across the old hard wood, gracing the fine shellac with another sequence of raps.

"I'm coming in, Sir," she calls again, pressing her open hand against the glass and a corner of the wood frame.

The ash door jars itself quietly awake, then slips back, revealing a middlingly dark room half-wrapped in dim sunlight that crackles evenly about, like the glint of crisp cellophane. But the gleam of dusk from out the architect's office-style floor to ceiling window does nothing to illuminate the cause of her frustration's whereabouts.

"Mister Plombkins?" Nostalgia rounds on the small desk in one corner, noting that the out of place waste paper bin and a toppled shelf aren't convenient enough to mask the partial shadow of a naked foot.

"You had better not be staring at that ring again, sir. You should be sleeping now, not playing with toys!" She edges up to the desk, pretends to dance her fingers across the deep corners of the slightly tilted writing surface with its glass cover and its tiny apothecary drawers on either side.

Her almond-colored eyes slide around the room, changing subtly from tan to grey to lavender as she considers the unmoving nature of the pedumbra.

She had expected a childish retort, to be honest. Something along the lines of, "Oh Prydonia, don't be such a worry wart! You never used to be this way when you visited my sister and myself! You weren't so concerned, then! And that reminds me, just the other day, I…" or perhaps, if he was in a darker sort of mood, no words, a little Puccini and a cup of cocoa.

Her high beige heels click somberly on the cool floor tiles as she moves around the fallen shelf.

Click. Click.

Click. Click.

Uh-uhn. Uhn.

She halts the clicking of her heels near a lump of half-crumpled black stocking when she feels the thing squish, soundless beneath her instep. It lies boy-sized and wrinkled on the floor. She bends, in a bark brown pencil skirt that hugs the hips and an egg blue blouse with heavy, dangling ruff, to pick it up, and finds a tie stuck inside that pools out as she raises the cotton foot-warmer to her nostrils.

Her nose wrinkles in pleasure at the mild gingerbread scent of her employer's adolescence, and she closes her eyes, inhaling the measure of him, smiling. Time Lords are physically incapable of smelling like anything but nice, even their feet.

Then she sees the body.

A child's body.

The spry young foot to go with the spry young sock.

But he's not spry at all.

She rushes to him in a huff of shock. Her bones melt down into neat folds like a paper airplane and she touches all over him, looking for bites or cuts in his ruffled black hair and under his tee-shirt.

He's stiff as the proverbial board, and so warm. His skin, normally so cool and smooth like Ice Dolphin flesh, is too hot. It feels strange, as though it might try to steam soon, and she wonders if he's somehow come down with something. Perhaps it isn't the ring that caused this… perhaps he's just sick… but no. That's silly. It's always the ring.

" You just had to touch it again, didn't you?" she groans as she hefts the floppy frame of her charge onto the desk, then flicks her earpiece on. "The potential for reverberant temporal overlap is greatest in this area, you know that! You little snot. Why in hells did you do it again?" One limp little wrist, hot and clammy in her fingers, brushes against her thigh like a weakly thrown toy pillow as she sucks in hard breaths and stores the oxygen in her extra lungs, preparing in case she has to breathe for him.

Silently, she waits with him as he breathes too shallowly in her arms, as her earpiece's emergency feed sends out for any nearby med-bots, security guards or certified Medicals, anyone with a level five health clearance, really.

"It's all right, Daddy," she says softly, brushing a strand of his whitening hair back from his blanched little boy face with its arched nose and dull eyes grasping at nothing, wrapt in unconsciousness. "You'll come back. You always do."


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter Nine: Fish and Chips

"Well, now!" cries Benjamin Pond, lifting the champagne flute full of sloshing violet water which he'd claimed earlier and quite violently from a passing tray, "Are there any eats to be had in this sizeable coppice of fancy fishbowls?"

A tan hand trims the fat from his excesses, smacking him lightly 'cross the back of his vehement, nodding head of flopsy brown rabbit hair.

The hair bounces as her fingers leave him, and he can feel her touch escaping his senses. Before she leaves him, her fingertips scratch lightly in his scalp, and suddenly he imagines his head as a forest made from the backs of field mice as they run in twilight gardens.

Lights flicker from somewhere.

His wife's laughter echoes across the room, filtering the scene that dances over the big hanging screen made of crystallized seaweed. The strands of sea-life move back and forth like a wind chime, tinkling as they hit each other.

All the fish in the fishbowls are turning to face them, because the nice seaweed view-screen is now showing pictures of giant trees growing from the backs of field mice.

"I take it you're having a good time with the telepathy weed!" a blue-gilled, thin silver minnow says casually, the words bubbling up from her bowl's translator cube with only a very slight lag.

"Look at that, River!" Benjamin nods his wife a yes as he calls out, shouting over his shoulder at her.

The white-toga'd woman in gold curls stares, meditating on his face as though the sun is shining at her.

She turns, as though the moon is winking at her.

She laughs, as though the…

"River are you going to get over here? I want to kiss you rather badly!"

A smile lights her face. He watches her lips curve, red as cherries, across a tanned mask of carefully mocked indignance as she angles her way toward him.

"And here!" he calls to the small ballroom-intended sea of fishbowls on custom hover-pillars, reaching out an arm in white to his wife as he matches her smile. "A morsel of food, nay, but she's not angry anyway!"

"Shouldn't you be calling me Emily? Benjamin darling?" she teases, reaching down to fit long hands nicely to his pregnant belly.

"Yes, dear. Hrm? Oh. Oh! Oops." he flounders, grasping at verbal straws while the one in his mouth bumbles about across the wild terrain of his pouty red lips.

"Close your mouth, Benjamin," her finger says as she clamps him shut with a trim nail, manicured and natural. "…you'll catch flies when you ought to be attracting other kinds of prey."

"Like you?" he gasps, turning into a ripe beet as she plays with the Easter egg swell of his small stomach where it bulges beautifully beneath a stretched length of creamy toga drape.

Her greyish greenish eyes turn blue with wonder and she glares at him, the happy laughter in her gaze deepening as she drinks him in. She takes him by the arm, digging her fingers light as a child's into the tame olive-ochre folds of tunic cloth at his side and the rich milk bends of toga spilling down from his left shoulder, and guides his front in the direction of the food.

"I was thinking of you needing to eat. You're looking pale, my love. Let's go see if they've got anything more substantial than… " she stares at him then, her almond-shaped eyes widening as she takes in the sudden chalky color of his face.

Benjamin's lovely peridot eyes turn suddenly to the paler green blanch of prehnite. His arms and hands and searching fingers snake around his stomach like wax on a Catherine wheel; he sinks against her, his boyish delight reduced to a lurking mnemonic shadow drowning in the rainy grey tones now trumpeting victory over his normal, healthy flush.

Instantly, she begins to look around for someone taller than the other guests. "… nibbles. Chair! Someone get my husband a chair, now!"

"Emily… River?" he manages as he fixates on all the concerned fishbowls, closing in, "I'll be back in a moment. I've… got to go somewhere."

She's holding him up now. His legs are like bricks of deuterium with sandals on.

"Where are you going at this late hour?" she says softly as she pets his hair and grasps his face to her body as he slides.

"Nowhere."

Then he covers his hand, pushes the rose on his golden ring. Nothing happens.

The floor, he thinks as gravity deposits him on the fashionable blue and off-white diamond-pattern marble tiles, is very cold and hard. But his eyes close long before his face plants itself in the marble and cracks the bridge of his nose, leaving a broken septum and a small smear of orange-red blood near River's feet.

Her eyes are narrow on herself, accusing as she bends to wrap an arm around him, turning him over into a haze of folded cream and pale skin. His breaths come quick and shallow against her cheek, slight little puffs of air like whiffs of surf from any given sea set far beneath watchful cliffs.

She never sees the blue-eyed man in the long coat who'd been staring at her husband's face from across the room retract himself from the shadow of the fishbowled crowd and down the marble stairs. Never sees his shoulders sink like millstones around his neck as he falls with each step backward into anger, then screams around on his heavy, sinking heel and runs.


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter Ten: Mixolydian Song

Flamina's Dream

"Just what do you think you're doing, young lady?" the rabbit-haired man says over her head.

Damn. He's caught her. Well let him watch as she squeezes the life out of…

Flamina sticks her hands in the goo in front of her, feeling the beating of wings in every bump of flesh as the lumpy mass squirms beneath her hands. Dark red oozes out between her fingers, crawling in waves of soft, thick petals over her skin. Reveling, she draws in closer and closer, until the bloody mess writhes and shakes, a dead rabbit prostrate and dripping, pooling wet sounds onto the packed floor tiles from her fingertips.

"If you want to kill me, shouldn't you start with that one first?" he quips, reaching around her to grab the beating heart from her grasp. He points with it across the white of the hallway, toward another cloched object, a folded card, sitting quietly beneath the glass on the cool white chalk pedestal.

Her white hair tilts across her forehead, spreading out and around her vaguely heart-shaped face like a pure Arabian's wild, creamy forelock. Her fingers scrape against the smoothed squares of his features, the bridge of his thick nose, the petulant quirking lips curved as the ribbons on presents. She wants to run away from him. Flaring her nostrils just as she has read in his great library a real horse would do, she pushes off his thin chest and, holding fast to his tweed lapels, she shoves at him, scratching and biting and fighting in a cloud of long nails and bearded skin and failed attempts at escaping.

"What's the matter, little Flamme? Can't keep hold of yourself?" he says suddenly when she opens her eyes again. Though still bearded, he is no longer standing beside her, instead, he is across the room slightly, his abrupt body quiet in white linen and sandals. In a softer voice, older and wiser and full of what he must consider an old man's mischief, he says, "Have you found the black door yet, the one with the crack on it?"

Hs big hands open, like water pouring into a desert, and instead of his dead heart, there is a very live rabbit there, white furred and huddling, its dark, guileless eyes open and restless. Her lavender gaze lies flayed and ravished by this, for some reason, trembling before the coney's scruffy scrunched up question of a countenance.

"Maybe I have! It matters not. I shall steal it, whatever you keep there!"

She imagines she looks quite fierce, determined. She is proud of herself. It is in the way she stands up to him.

Why then has she not moved to be closer to him, to show him her pride?

"Hahahaah! Hahahahahahahahah! Well, when you find it, come and get me. It's not a door to be painted lightly. Although I imagine –she- would think otherwise. You two ought to get along, given time! Hahahaha!"

He walks away, but not before waving his arm at a space down the hall, just out of view.

And why does he laugh so? As though something of minor importance has suddenly become the grandest jest imaginable?


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter Eleven: Off the Shoulders of Orion

Jack Harkness stands in the light of a dewy street lamp, surveying the place.

Silvery metal and the rusty red comfort of old bricks weave up at twisting angles from the damp noir sidewalk, a thick yet delicate baobab bursting out from the awkward cauldron of the everyday.

An answer to his unspoken question, he concludes, is that the Indsø Tys has led a busy life, and as his eyes follow the lines of the big, loping structure, dallying in the pits and cracks of those aging blocks of baked clay and shale and fillers, lingering here and there over the pooling, faded sheens of prancing flexiplatinum that's been eating its generic wheat-product cereal, he begins to make the usual assumptions as to what that life might be worth to him.

Why has he come here, he asks, as he steps forward into the night shadow of the sinuous, heavily-stylised building and reaches out to touch a hard brick popping out like a ready pimple from an oddly curved corner... he laughs.

He laughs again, then answers himself. "Well that's an easy one, isn't it, 'Jack'?" His other hand, long fingers chilling to bone despite being deep inside the pocket of his dark trousers, balls into a frosty fist and stays where it is.

"Boy meets Boy. Boy One sleeps with Boy Two. Boy Two turns out to be a god damn Time Lord, just not the right one." He tightens the fist in his pocket, turning up to the sky because the Environmentals are whirring and buzzing overhead.

Bzzt. Krunk-krunk-krunketa. Bzzt.

Ploosh. A droplet from the freshly-created rainstorm overhead.

The system is newer than the one on Rapunzel, that Ood Phillip Cake's turf, and it shows. The quiet is deafening, and all he can hear is the whir of the machines. Hadn't Cake had a revelation, in the rain?

Jack barks a laugh at the crisp, artificial night air, letting out a slow and lumbering breath that catches on his lips, stuttering his exhalation like a paper bag with a hole in it. He's always known better than to let himself believe in providence. But with Him, he'd come close. With Him. But He had died, and probably alone, the bastard. And then, Benjamin Pond had turned up like a pretty weed, sweet blue flowers and all. Jack had just been a bee for him, his handsome prince, his pollinator of convenience.

His golden ball, to be lost down the well.

And wasn't that just like a Time Lord?

Plink.

Plink-plink.

Sht-sht plink, sht-sht plink.

The rain isn't going to stop. It's getting icy now, hitting the pavers across the way in the demure green circle of purple and blue plump Deluvian tulips. The rain just seems to... slide right over them. Strange.

As he walks away, back to the miserably perfect hotel -with the green and grey striped faded floral wallpaper- Benjamin or Plombkins or both of them must have paid for, he considers things.

Yes, he thinks, how appropriate- a rent-a-cop working at a museum.

Good going, Princess.


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter Thirteen: Man on Fire in a Chinese Room

Flashback

Once more, a comely spoon threatens the nirvana of bliss that is unconsciousness, so the Doctor opens his eyes again.

The gnarled old handle is there, just like before, and, just like before, the gnarled old hand has wrapped its gnarled old fingers around it.

Slowly, delicately, as though he is a mother reptile enfolding precious, leathery, soft, easily-torn eggs in sharp, chipped, monstrous teeth, he props one eyelid up and reaches for her hand, folding also the wrist-resting spoon into his touch as though skin, utensil and all were uncooked dough in need of leavening.

" I admire you, old woman." he mumbles quietly after finishing such a soup as has never been drunk on grey sand before or since, "I would never have done it. You are stronger than I." With much less a sigh than an exhaled seal of ephemeral contentment, he slurps the last of the hot liquid from the bowl; unlike the scrumptious, sumptuous soup, it smells of vaguely heavy fish and some sort of chowdery cheese. Delicious, on any other day.

"All these I's! You always were such a lovely boy, daft and selfish to a fault. I have to get you back on your feed. You are not well yet, and there is still journey ahead of you." The wrinkles on her hands squirm like little butter snails over his face, then drop down to his stomach, where they situate themselves across the small of his back and begin to rub, dousing a lance of stabby ache he'd been feeling since before he'd woken this last time.

As the old woman works, the Doctor looks away, leaning back on his arms, a lazy teenager lying in the disguising rugs and carpets that pass for high grass in the Time-Locked storage he'd tucked away forever ago.

"When do you think to do it, my Lord?" she wonders aloud, slipping the question in between the circles she rubs along his spine and shoulder blades. "You can't be putting it off forever, now, child."

"Did I wait too long, old woman?" asks he, and a smack across his sturdy back echoes for his troubles." I take it that's a no then. Well, it might as well happen now." He sticks a hand in his impossible pocket, comes out with a strange silvery-tan rod with a green light at the top. His sonic, she supposes. "There's a linkup that has to happen; let me see if the pawn's in position and then you can spread the stuff around, make it look nasty for the audience. Meet me back here, head in my lap at six of the clock, do you hear me, old thing? I'll make this easy on you if it kills me."

Another smack of that beloved old palm, and then the nurse is out the tent flap, so to speak.

Once he hears that she is gone, the Doctor throws off the blankets and stands up, arching and stretching himself, then goes to a locked cabinet disguised as a small storage locker with the Gallifreyan symbol for vegetable pills written in hasty red scrawl on the silvery top. He runs his hand over the box, letting it scan his biodata for confirmation. It slides open, revealing a leather bracer with embedded keypad.

He reaches inside, takes the wriststrap and applies it to his right wrist, entering coordinates in the general proximity of Old Earth, 2012. Then he looks back at the tent flap, rubs the burn from his stinging eyes, and depresses the small key beside a screen that reads,

TELEPORT?


	13. Chapter 13

Chapter Thirteen: Man on Fire in a Chinese Room

Flashback

Once more, a comely spoon threatens the nirvana of bliss that is unconsciousness, so the Doctor opens his eyes again.

The gnarled old handle is there, just like before, and, just like before, the gnarled old hand has wrapped its gnarled old fingers around it.

Slowly, delicately, as though he is a mother reptile enfolding precious, leathery, soft, easily-torn eggs in sharp, chipped, monstrous teeth, he props one eyelid up and reaches for her hand, folding also the wrist-resting spoon into his touch as though skin, utensil and all were uncooked dough in need of leavening.

" I admire you, old woman." he mumbles quietly after finishing such a soup as has never been drunk on grey sand before or since, "I would never have done it. You are stronger than I." With much less a sigh than an exhaled seal of ephemeral contentment, he slurps the last of the hot liquid from the bowl; unlike the scrumptious, sumptuous soup, it smells of vaguely heavy fish and some sort of chowdery cheese. Delicious, on any other day.

"All these I's! You always were such a lovely boy, daft and selfish to a fault. I have to get you back on your feed. You are not well yet, and there is still journey ahead of you." The wrinkles on her hands squirm like little butter snails over his face, then drop down to his stomach, where they situate themselves across the small of his back and begin to rub, dousing a lance of stabby ache he'd been feeling since before he'd woken this last time.

As the old woman works, the Doctor looks away, leaning back on his arms, a lazy teenager lying in the disguising rugs and carpets that pass for high grass in the Time-Locked storage he'd tucked away forever ago.

"When do you think to do it, my Lord?" she wonders aloud, slipping the question in between the circles she rubs along his spine and shoulder blades. "You can't be putting it off forever, now, child."

"Did I wait too long, old woman?" asks he, and a smack across his sturdy back echoes for his troubles." I take it that's a no then. Well, it might as well happen now." He sticks a hand in his impossible pocket, comes out with a strange silvery-tan rod with a green light at the top. His sonic, she supposes. "There's a linkup that has to happen; let me see if the pawn's in position and then you can spread the stuff around, make it look nasty for the audience. Meet me back here, head in my lap at six of the clock, do you hear me, old thing? I'll make this easy on you if it kills me."

Another smack of that beloved old palm, and then the nurse is out the tent flap, so to speak.

Once he hears that she is gone, the Doctor throws off the blankets and stands up, arching and stretching himself, then goes to a locked cabinet disguised as a small storage locker with the Gallifreyan symbol for vegetable pills written in hasty red scrawl on the silvery top. He runs his hand over the box, letting it scan his biodata for confirmation. It slides open, revealing a leather bracer with embedded keypad.

He reaches inside, takes the wriststrap and applies it to his right wrist, entering coordinates in the general proximity of Old Earth, 2012. Then he looks back at the tent flap, rubs the burn from his stinging eyes, and depresses the small key beside a screen that reads,

TELEPORT?


	14. Chapter 14

Chapter Fourteen: There's A Thumb In My Humble Pie

Flashback.

"Well, I would stay and have a bite, but that Guinea Hen, lovely as it is, well… for some reason it reminds me of a rat in a plastic bag, see?"

Mickey Smith sucks in a gasp as he stares at the pregnant young man sitting in his kitchen, with his favorite mug full of hot tea held in both hands.

"But, you weren't there, with me and Rose and the boss, you… you're… you can't be, he's… you're supposed to be…"

"I can't answer that. The whole of Creation could depend on my not answering that question, Mister Smith, so please… don't ask me it again. Besides, my clothes are rubbish- I've been wandering the stellar streets for a month."

"Oh shut it, Mickey! But, let me get this right- 'Benjamin', you're a Time Lord? But, I thought…"says Martha Jones, her dark eyes grinning at their visitor. As she pulls up a chair beside Benjamin's, she tries to head her husband off at the pass with a kick at his shin under the iron tabletop.

"I know, I know, 'all the Time Lords were turned into incredibly brainy goulash by the Doctor'." Benjamin laughs, holding his head after a moment. "Well, some of us survived, mostly good ones, some bad. But that's not here or there. Or even today. What is important now is that none of you say anything of what you suspect to our dear Captain Jack. Do not let on. Do not interfere. The whole of Creation could depend on…"

Martha watches her husband's dark head flash to the left, and suddenly her heart feels julienned in her throat, like the delicate strips of carrot she'd been slicing earlier.

Jack Harkness is standing in the doorway. His black boots are scratched and scuffed, and caked with old dirt.

He moves.

Martha remembers, as she blinks her eyes, the way he held her back when that Mayfly was trying to bust out of her abdominal cavity. The touch of his long hands against her skin, like an older brother, in a way. Soft. Calculating. Frantic to save.

Now, as she opens her eyes, all she can see are those same, strong hands wrapping around -Benjamin Pond's- throat.

"The whole of Creation… you said that already. Losing your mojo, Pond?"

Benjamin gives a barked, strangled laugh, as though his lungs are gargling battery acid- an ugly, unexpected sound from an unexpected man. "This old man, he… urk! … he played one! He played… glg… knick knack…glurg… on his… thumb… Do you have a thumb, Jack?"

"The better to pull out a plum with." Jack answers with a bright grin. But his pretty blue eyes are flat-lining. Soon, his fingers dig for a place in the Time Lord's shoulder, inside the fleshy part near the outermost joint. First, he presses gently, as if he's fluting pie crust edges with a fork. Then he drives his thumbnail home, tipping the digit forward and pressing in, over and over, until the alien man in his arms writhes out like a billowing curtain... if curtains were made of bits of holey, camel colored coat and scraps of striped rags.

Then Jack withdraws his bloody thumb and stares at it as more reddish-orange fluid spurts from the puncture.

"You killed that woman in front of kids, you creepy little shit," the Time Agent proclaims in Benjamin's ear, sitting slightly. Globs of salivary foam smack against the Time Lord's limp brown hair, clinging, then drooling down in sad little rivulets to form salt lines on his face.

Benjamin is on the floor now. Jack Harkness' black boot heel is crunching into the thumb-shaped wound to his praetoria nervimaniplus, bloodying itself. Minutes pass. Soon, there is goo and thickened blood solution crusting on the leather.

"You know, Jack," the Time Lord murmurs from the floor, one hand clasped against the remains of his striped shirt where the ruined strips still stretch across his pregnant body. "… I am so very glad you've managed to get all this out, but really, aren't you forgetting something?"

"Jack, he's pregnant!" Martha can't help herself. Her hands are on the pulse pistol she keeps in a shielded drawer near the dish soap. "Stop this! I'm sorry Benjamin, but it isn't in me to watch this! It isn't right! Think of that baby, Jack! What would Rose have done?"

The Time Agent's eyes are blue steel now, fixed on Benjamin Pond. "Don't go there, Nightingale. Don't ever go there. Besides, after watching what this psychopath did to that woman… did he tell you he married the Doctor's murderer?"

Mickey Smith is glaring at the Time Agent. Just glaring, his wide eyes gleaming like little wet moles in the dark. His hands are quirking toward his sleek black sidearm.

Benjamin Pond just stares up into the face of Jack Harkness, these soft angles and hard orbs that love the Doctor so deeply he would do this. As his gaze slides at a steady lag down from Jack onto Martha and Mickey then back to Jack, he says, "I know what he's thinking, you know. He's thinking we shouldn't breed. I don't really blame him. But I…oh now that doesn't feel very nice, Jack. Could you move your foot, it's making me dizzy, and..." He cuts himself off with open lips quivering apart, then tries to sit up, shoving against Jack's incumbent foot. His shoulder squelches like a wet balloon against the black boot's rubber sole, forcing his still-smiling mouth to stretch into a cavernous, pearly parody of itself.

"Stop moaning. We both know your kind are stronger than this." Jack says softly, lifting his heel just a fraction so the Time Lord can breathe before shoving and twisting back down again, harder than before.

A breeze blows up the Time Agent's back then, and a set of old doors creaks open on a tall Swedish grandmother clock that wasn't there before.


	15. Chapter 15

Chapter Fifteen: It's Very Superstitious

Flashback.

"Against my better judgment, friend, I brought you a new change of clothes," someone says.

It's the man from the Unicorn, Jack marvels absently to himself as the gun he didn't remember drawing to point at Pond's head lowers the space of a fingernail. Then it lowers some more.

A package slides into Benjamin Pond's hip. He smiles again, although his eyes are beginning to want to roll…

"Well, you know me. Always with the blondes and parties. Are you going to help me play teacher, or just scream like a little girl in pigtails and a frilly skirt?" says Benjamin, scrubbing his face with a dirty hand while the man from the bar in the green velvet coat snakes his fingers around Jack's weapon and slides the gun away.

Green Coat smirks, then turns and uses the butt of the gun to knock on the green jade doors he's just come out of. They slowly, carefully begin to creak out the way. He tosses the firearm inside a greenish goldish room full of stairs and wood panels. The doors close again.

"Oh, I don't know. I've always had a thing about rats. Speaking of relations, I brought Emily. Infernal woman."

"Infernal is right. Even the Daleks fear her, after what she did." Jack mutters under his breath. His lungs are constricting, like crumpled oxygen bags; they feel old and used. The man's time capsule is right there. He came out of her. Green Coat must be a Time Lord… but, which faction? It won't detract from his revenge to watch this particular side show play out. He laughs to himself; he didn't used to be so unattached. He used to be…

"Ignore him, Eight." Benjamin quips with a wince as he reaches under Jack's foot to rub his stomach. He looks up, and his peridot eyes are dark on Green Coat's face. "How… how long since…?"

Green Coat's youngish, roundish, thinnish, sharpish, owlish face drops suddenly at that, grey-blue eyes staring like ghost lights, but then a red-nailed hand pops out of his pagoda-shaped ship's double doors with a robin's egg blue teacup on a saucer for him. Without turning, he spins an arm about to take it, in a whirl of greenish bluish velvet coat flaps.

Benjamin, still on the floor, is dragged away from Jack and up into a chair by Martha while Mickey grabs the mug of tea and holds it to his lips, minus the rug burn he got through the tear in his trousers, which is already healing. "So, old friend, the tea is drunk, the beds are warm, and we are again without a paddle. Par for the course. Do be nice to that one, will you? He's a favorite of mine."

"Don't ask questions you know the answer to. And do pardon the mess. As for this one, I'll do my best. You're still bleeding from this little stunt, or I'd spank you too... Mister Pond. As for you, Captain," Green Coat stabs a long finger at the Time Agent's shoulder, bringing him down with a single pressure point jab. "…come into my parlour. If you're very quiet, I'll show you why they call me the Hitchemus Devil." Then he grins like a monstrous midnight crocodile, teeth all shining with promise, pearls in the inky dark as he picks Jack up by the seat of his mundane grey trousers and pitches him into the strange TARDIS like a sack of potatoes.

A feminine laugh echoes from beyond the mini-capsule's doors, and then the light goes out again. Good old Sweetie, of course, Benjamin thinks as Martha Jones reaches across his chest to shear off the bloody bit of shirt near his stabbed shoulder. Mickey has a warm wet sponge and is busy dabbing at the torn flesh.

Somewhere between warm water and the natural progression of sponge toward cake, Benjamin Pond's head lolls, and he drifts.

But before his head can hit the table, the Green Pagoda materializes around him and is off again, taking a squarish, labyrinthine, Mandarin Screen bite out of Mickey's nice new wood table.

The teacup is gone, too… but there is a blue note, stuck to an inside corner.

'I did say it. The hologram cut out on the letter L because the sun burned out and I had no more power or will to make a second pass through to Pete's World. Anyway, as always, my favorite idiot, you make the most excellent tea. Proud of you both.'

- Ɵ Ʃ


	16. Chapter 16

Chapter Sixteen: Blue Boy

No one is coming. But she thought she'd try the signal anyway.

"Is that you, Prydonia?" asks the pale little boy in her mini-skirted lap. Her fingers, long and white and clean, prance like a butterfly over his sweltering forehead, every nerve of those digits reading necessity into the deuterium-thick droplets collecting on his skin.

"The Laneet, they bleed white, and sweat heavy water when they die in a certain way, did you know?" the boy continues, blinking crystalline peridots at her for a moment, before those luscious orbs close, and his little body quakes with little shivers.

His peripheral nerves are shutting down, because his small fingers curl in a rictus, the steadfast grip of a weak and traitor claw scrabbling in the dark for a random stuffed toy. He can no longer feel them though, so it's all right.

One side of his face slides down suddenly, a little to the left like one of Dali's clocks. He quirks wholly in the cup of her grasp, stiffening, a dying saguaro in knee pants.

Her tears leak like oil over her blouse, staining the robin's egg ruff a dark rain blue, in places.

"Did you have to do it this way, daddy?" she breathes, feeling her constrictor throat seize up into a dirty, mixed up knot entirely similar to the whirlwinds of junk swallowed by polluted rivers.

Georgie Plombkins just smiles; of course, it's a half-smile now, literally the right half of a smile, what with the stroke coming on again. There, like a nest of fibers in the chalice of her hands, his floppy black hair is turning to snow, pitch melting into cloudy day.

Soon there is the sense of liquid running under her heels, lapping silently in an impatient rush against the shiny lacquer. So much reminds her of the crashing waves, lately.

Her eyes close in a blink, and suddenly his young hand is making chaste pilgrimage over the petite mounds of her breasts, where they hang well beneath the blue blue blouse- juicy grapes draped on a vine out of any fox's reach, if they want any good should come to them. His digits tangle on the hem, resting for a moment near the cried-upon ruff; but he regains himself, and she squirms as his dusty palm flattens between her two hearts.

Death throes, then, and soon after, not even the Ring she slipped back on his finger remains.


	17. Chapter 17

Chapter Seventeen: How To Play Old Maid

Somewhere on Gallifrey, the sound of a hard clack can be heard.

In a sealed white room, the pinkish, white-tipped nails of a French Manicure tap softly to on a laid bare wrist.

The wrist is on a table. There is a leaning shoulder -wrapped in a bit of temperature-controlled grey blanket- attaching the wrist to the man and the man to the wrist.

The man is sitting in a chair, his hunched form covered by the grey blanket and others. Near the edge of the circular table, balanced in the man's open fingers like a cigarette, there is a silvery packet the size of a playing cards deck; twenty-three uniform tiny chads are busted and broken along its lined surface, and would dangle if the thing were picked up, perhaps even flutter to the floor like bits of foil, which is what they are.

Bits of foil.

In the center of the table is a hand-size white pyramid, floating above the table face at just the height of a man's nose. Below it lies an inset game board with an intentional crack, surrounded on all sides by black and white little round pieces, still slightly shiny despite their obvious age.

A small shadow falls across the board; another body holding a cup has entered the small white stone room; the door floats shut behind this new wrinkled one, growing into the wall as though it had never been there.

The cup is carried to the table, and is set beside the woman in white with the clean, tended hands.

She takes it, wrapping those lovely bones around the warmth of the steaming cup, then savours a sip.

Her half-closed gaze looks up to see the old man who brought her the tea deciding on a chair, near a wall where a single blue-green, paper rose-shaped succulent stands happily in a yellow pot.

"The Little Prince is out of commission, it seems." she murmurs, drawing one grey eye away from heavy thoughts of seating as she considers the small white piece that just fell into the crack in the board. It had first tumbled, she remembers, a small, impetuous human week ago. He's kept it floating on the rim of the crack for an entire week, and not just that one- he's controlling almost every piece. But now the little tumbled white stone has fallen into the black hole at the center of the board.

The rest of the old man follows from his study of the colored chairs; River half expects a creak from the branchy limbs and vanished teeth, but he flows about like a watery tide splashing expert and hither on the rocks.

"Indeed, my little Songbird, and there are not many pills left in that last pack." the old man parries with a warm smile that, though genuine, affords his dry-mud countenance no favours. "If he does not break concentration soon, we may have to venture outside the room, and…"

"There's no need for that, Pasmodius, we'll all be leaving this little cubby soon enough, now," the young man croaks from a bullfrog throat. His fingers clench convulsively on the packet, crunching it, crisping the foil and freeing the last three pills, which trickle out of the bubbles then plummet to the tabletop in a series of thick clacks.

They roll, those pills, off the table top and to the floor, smacking against the back white wall in a powdery thick cloud.

The young man's once floppy brown hair is plastered to his forehead, just like it was last week. His free hand is still where he left it, too; wrapped close around his body, splayed against his still-modest girth as though his bump might detach and run away.

"That's enough, Theta- go to bed. Sleep for an hour, at least!" the woman says, rubbing down the front of her white dress.

Pasmodius sighs and lifts a spidery hand, settling it on the man's back. "She's right, my boy- you mustn't tax yourself by getting up after so long a vigil. One of us will fetch you something with more culinary spirit than that hard-packed dry millet you've been forcing down."

It's the Doctor's turn to sigh, now. He licks his lips, even after River puts a small cup of water to his lips and glares at him over the rim.

"They're vitamin capsules, Pasmo… for the baby. Made them myself, after I realised things might turn pear-shaped."

River holds the cup to his lips again, silently willing him to drink so she can bundle him off to the comfy little bed-chair in the corner.

Those pretty peridots meet her hazels though, and then, it's all over.

"Hey there, pretty girl…" he says, taking the stone cup in hands shaking with exhaustion and tipping its contents down his throat, "… think I could… get a hand up? I fancy a quick walk before I get what's coming to me."


	18. Chapter 18

Chapter Eighteen: Security Guards

A swish of blonde hair and its diminutive owner stride lovingly away into the dark as the scene behind doors just locked continues, sparingly, unmindful of retreating childish footfalls or their gift of a prisoning click.

No, the conversation behind doors flows forward thusly, like the trumpet of feast after a war, trumping all cares save those of the two hungry and dominant males who now resume their places in the comm. Room after circling each other, much as beasts do when fighting over tasty, bleeding morsels.

"I hate you. Why can't you just surrender like normal people? Because you aren't normal people, that's why! You… old buzzard! And your taste in clothing is worse than the Doctor's!"

"As if I would rise to such a statement." Rassilon says, lifting a finger upon which rests a small silver dot. "These are amusing. When did you find the time, between harassing me and stalking him?"

The dot is confiscated by the blunted teeth of a tweezers, which glint in the Master's hand, two convoluted silver twists in the near darkness of the small monitoring station. "Fucking moron! Do that again and I'll kill you! These are delicate." His blonde head turns on his grin. He focuses on one screen in the bank of thousands that hover in the shadow of the room, and licks his tongue across dry lips as he hands the ancient Time Lord a white paper bag, crinkled and crunchy. "I multi-task well. Try the fried bat."

Rassilon taps his fingers on the console in front of them both, a horrid, dull thing of drab grey-blues and mismatched rows of raised cubical buttons and depressed bubble lights. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. "All the other cretins I vanquished are usually dead by now. Cretin." His strong, nimble hand dips into the bag, draws out a fragile, dangling lump of breaded, curling claw, and pops it in his mouth, crunching on each digit with a deliberate leisure. "Yes, the bat does melt on the tongue. And the answer to my question would be?"

Koschei of Oakdown knows he is the Master, Great Lord President of all life upon this gorgeous, drowsy stolid little red rock, and all that lies beyond it. But the drowsy little rock won't be drowsy for much longer. The documents secured by the Hand will prove invaluable to him in rooting out the worms. And as for the Doctor…

"Huh."

A snort from Rassilon in the plastic-y chair beside him, and the Master returns more of his attentions to the screen. "Do you think you could shut up for a minute? I'm busy calculating… things." Snorting back at Rassilon, he crumples something small, blue and thin in his left hand, then swivels back to the screen.

"Hah."

Another snort, but this time a hand to the fall of shadow tucked below the prominent chin. Consideration, so blatant. What is in his mind?

"Lord Master, Lord Master, Lord Master- that was weak, even for you. I have not been a child for a very long while. Therefore, shall I be gracious and give you lessons on being an adult?"

With sudden impudence, the pretty eyes like blue wheels swivel, stabbing to the right; the long lashes quiver over apportion, gauging just how much to give away as they hover like cliff birds, for in a corner screen of their necessary theatre, a figure flickers like snow at the rounded edges of crystalline displays inset and bubbling out from each mooring, reflecting an element of menace in kaleidoscope.

One screen, two screens, three screens, four; something crawling over them ignites into life, graying out those screens where a boy lies dying next to a man and a woman in the park, beneath the lonely figure standing in the rain near a Jacob's Ladder of bricks and gleaming liquid glass. Those uncomely, scratching, black, vaguely feminine fingers growl across the displays, drowning out a man and another man in bed together. They stretch like a pall through the reaches of the TARDIS, casting a shade against a melting white figure connected by wires to another man, whose cheeks are nearly bloodless too, for a different reason.

But again, five screens, six screens, seven screens more. The hand is flying now, soaring through the watching eyes, reducing the task of an angel in stone to nothing beside this.

For this is a travesty.

The bag of bats is on the floor.


	19. Chapter 19

Chapter Nineteen: Just Another Blue Eyed Son

Flashback.

The Indsø Tys receptionist looks out, her head a massive yellow diamond-like shard floating above bare, cool marble shoulders.

One figure cuts his usual swathe, a single Boekind human standing next to a flood of incoming staff coming in early – it's crunch time before the big day. One man, the Museum accountant from the office on the fifth floor, has a glass pyramid for a head. A cerulean-hued chair set is prancing along the hallway to her right, near the Braxiatel Collection Entrance sign. Passed the sign, the small mechanical rat named Philomena and someone with large hairy feet (it must be Murray, the Yeti) hold paws as they share tiny nut-based coffees from the workers only café.

"Good morning, Steve!" she calls out to the Boekind man, noting the angle of his gaze as his blue, blue eyes sweep across her denuded second scapula. The first, thank the seven stars and fifteen goddesses, is hidden under the cellophane folds of her plastic party dress.

Jack Harkness is looking. There's no shame in admiring such a fine form; the choice, ripe shoulders that gleam down from a spectacular vertebrate structure like stairs slipping over water, the way the limbs and hips strain under that milky flesh, like white birds under the surface. The tiny curve of tiny shoes that flick upward in back and slurp down her hard, cloven hooves, crunching that water from liquid into deer-foot vanity ice cubes. She's like an old 30's Help Desk Girl, the way she mans her station, a small blue note in her hand. Very sexy.

As he walks by her purple desk, the small, sturdy affair of flowing, living purple fur and heart-shaped wood slats dripping phosphorescent moss like little candles on strings, he sees something else.

A strange shadow is gripping the edge of the wall behind her, standing to the side as though geckoes suddenly married groundhogs, waiting for the inevitable post-winter contest out of antiquity. It crawls along her body-tube, the flexible pipe full of white liquid her kind seem to need to survive.

"Laneet," he ventures as he closes his eyes, feeling his lips peel like the papery bark of a strange dark tree he saw once, in a painting from one of the TARDIS storerooms. "There's someone behind you."

She does not turn, and then, a strange buzzing sound.

And then.


	20. Chapter 20

Chapter Twenty: In the Halls of My Father

Flamina's Dream.

Curl, furl, freeze and flatten.

Lift and touch and flow.

Her toes feel strange, in this place of white walls and… that man.

Her black toenails incongruous like pitch smears in this place of endless white, she moves with caution, pinching herself to the shining walls as if forking a pie crust.

And oh, quite yes, there is a pie she wants to eat, full of coursing blood and quiet rhythm. With crust of red and filling-fruit of destiny, it lingers in the dark, waiting for her. She hears it, beating. The shadow of the heart he keeps from her.

If he loved her, he would not.

The black door awaits at the end of the hall, looming, a room full of his treasures, no doubt.

She tends to the corner of the white wall a moment, having barefooted and tippy-toed to the end, so that her bright violet eyes glint around the corner to see more rooms amidst the white beyond to either side.

No. The Door is what she wants. And he knows it. He has left her alone, on purpose.

Why?

So she can open the door for him?

Wasn't he the one who put it there?

How annoying, she thinks, as her hands wrap around the smooth silver doorknob that sticks from the black slab like a maiden key in an old, old lock- he also knows she's going to do it anyway.

But despite his wile, he is still soft as a… what is the Solian word for a stupid young animal? Ah yes, lamb.

And she will card his wool, dye it well, and make presents of it to his little compatriots.

Her shadow will cover the land.

Click. Click.

Click.

As she enters the room, her imagined, mythic ribs grasp a breath and she sees-


	21. Chapter 21

Chapter Twenty-One: Carpenters and Ladies

Flashback.

Jack Harkness stares, rubbing his eyes open after that short blink he took just a second ago; was he still standing at her desk?

White liquid is all around, as though someone has let loose a pile of bouncing moonlight ribbons in an old attic room.

Long fingers click into place beside an alien countenance that once was yellow, angles like sunbeams that spill to a point on bottom and top, once, those lines formed the crystal face of the desk girl, Laneet.

Now the sun is gone, everything is black, and starshine, and Jack Harkness is staring at the hands of a man he has slept with.

Wondering why he ever could have done such a thing as lie with this… person.

"I'm going to bring you in, Benjamin." Jack says softly to the rounded belly and the camel coat and the striped shirt like moonbeams against gaol bars, the free hand scruffed in alien hair like a star-blotted handkerchief dropped in a park.

The changeable peridots glare out from a stern mask of chilled dough, their gaze full of the rough finality of Prospero, the slim, square grasp of those feather-digits perched on a thick organic extension cord covered in the yoghurt drool of Laneet's creamy body fluid. Benjamin's swollen torso is just as well hidden as his crime, too, for nearly all his body is clothed in a triangle shadow cast by the blue goldstone wall behind the Reception Area; someone will have to go back there eventually. They've got to pick the bits of bleachy thick blood from the electrified copper flecks in the blue wall, for evidence. To Jack, they shine like the stars in the Doctor's hair did when the light had been right, just like he remembers. Thousands of little golden flecks, gleaming like eyes in the dark. They would blink in shame again now, if they could see this.

"I've really done it," Benjamin breathes with a certain hoarseness, ignoring Jack in favour of rubbing his belly to get the white stains off but really just smudging them deeper into the fabric, then drawing his coat around himself in a daze, like a quavering street waif. "I've killed her." His arms pull in close against his flesh and he holds himself, bending over a little to rest on his knees before shoving his hair back over his head and backing away in small steps. He disappears.

One of the Museum's newly delivered artifacts, a grand, exquisitely carved pagoda of green jade about the size of a phone box, suddenly stands reticent behind the file cupboard where Benjamin went, Jack realises belatedly, his hindbrain relegating the green stone box to a very particular place in his mind. A place dealing with proof of guilt and… and other things.

"TIME LORD!" The cry bubbles up backward out of his head, after oozing through his vertebrae and brain stem, tumbling out of his mouth like the bloody expatriate let spewed from the lips of chest puncture victims.

Without looking down, Jack punches buttons on his wrist strap, entering a sequence of numbers that will tell the strap's microcomputer to daisy chain Benjamin's Pagoda.

As he disappears into the vortex, he realizes that he's never hated green more.


	22. Chapter 22

Chapter Twenty-Two: Five-Second Rule

"Do you recognise that?" Rassilon murmurs gravely, pointing at the infecting darkness as it inkily crawls across the comm room screens.

The Master, in excellent mockery of the acting skills of frozen fish, slams down a fist on the keyboard-like interface of triangles and cubes and raised circles, banging at every button in a whirlwind of whack-a-mole. "Yes, I do. It's annoying. Do you have any idea what it is?"

Rassilon's sigh perches on his lips, threatening rebellion as he struggles not to smile. He fails. "You know, My Lord Master, I think we have another little amusement on our hands. Do you hear a man screaming?" His fingers silently converge on a blue note, concealed in the folds of his red, red robe, and he resurrects it, unfolding the edges over and over, each slice of motion quiet, nimble. Hidden.

The Master stares at the ancient Time Lord with shuttered eyes, adopting a look he perfected long before he savoured roast bird in that stupid ape's mansion. "With any luck it's Pasmodius choking on another bone." he murmurs as his fingers grace the door panel that will let them both out.

"What?" the Master's hands pluck in vain at the sides of the panel. "Well that's just fucking brilliant. Someone's gone and fucking locked us in!"

At the Master's latest outburst, Rassilon allows the sigh, finally, then holds out a hand to telekinese the white paper bag off the floor and into his upturned palm. "We might as well enjoy it," he murmurs, holding the crinkled mass full of tasty winged treats out to the Master, with the blue note pushed inside in all its newfound greasy glory. "…it seems we've an invitation to the play. Want another?"


	23. Chapter 23

Chapter Twenty-Three: The Gang at 42nd Street

Flashback.

A small hand holds up a small note.

The note is blue, squarish. Straight-edged and unassuming.

"…-this- is what he wants us to do while he's busy with that artifact he stole?" asks the owner of the small female hand, her small female head bobbing side to side with what must be disdain.

Her blonde straight locks are limp and dry, as though she's been floured and pulled through a noodle machine.

"Ours might say differently, but we really shouldn't compare; you know what he's like, Borusa."

The little not-girl raises a blonde crown and eyes like blue furnaces again to the smiling face of the Doctor's latest companion. "I see your point, and raise you two pawns." Her small fingers snap, and a wrinkled figure slips in from the outside door. "Pasmodius, River Song. River Song, Pasmodius."

River Song nods to the girl, and to the old man who looks like an old man, her curls bouncing slightly off her bare bronzed shoulders like gold coins pouring from a leather purse. Then she sighs, and her lips curve into a smile unseen for quite a few weeks.

"I don't mean to be rude, but you're mixing your human metaphors again," says River, blushing as the old man grins a mouthful of what must be rusted teeth at her sea-scented heave of ample bosom, her full, earthy breasts nestled like rock doves in swathes of white ribbon-y cloth.

Borusa groans, ignoring her decrepit deputy, and begins to fold the note with meticulous hands back behind her young ear, in such a way as to make it stay there without assistance. "Well, we have no doubt as to who -you're- married to."


	24. Chapter 24

Chapter Twenty-Four: Ansypporus 6

White sun on white sky on white mountain peaks.

This is Above.

Above is nothing but puddles of cream against the vastness of green stone and green dust called Below.

Against that line of white and green, hill and mountain and flat plain wide, a few moments ago there shimmered a green carving of a box that fades here and there in dotted lines. Across the wide plain, there lies a sprinkling of monasteries, whose towers rise low into hills and sweep up, seemingly part of the mountains themselves.

Now, the blanched green shows edges of kick-up, of foot-shaped settlements planted in its grassy-hued finery.

But also another set of differences, reflected in the particles of green crystal dust that refuse to settle.

Therefore, the occupant of the box is being tracked by a man with blue eyes.

The monks do not know him.

But they know the box's owner well.

For this is the student of their master the Hermit. And he has come a long way, but he will find the Hermit absent.

The green chalcedonies crunch under the feet of anyone, really, except for the student of their master.

The student is wearing a camel coat, to-day, and over that a heavy tan dust cloak that dangles an incongruous fluffy bauble from its liripiped hood, but he approaches the twin doors of the Dust Monastery on bare feet, with sand-rubbed red toes like claws dyed green by the settling of the dust. He walks across the waters of the sea.

One by two his feet they fall across the sea, his long ratio of heel to toenail flexing with the shifting waxy stones that gleam dully as though coated with milky oil.

His body sways, lopsidedly, a dying rodent hanging from a hunter's belt, but he sways across, his arms stuck fast around his sides, enfolding.

The pursuing one is wise; he follows in the student's steps, picking out the path against the ocean of pale green stones.

Soon, they are both on the other side of the sea…. And from the stark line of cocoa-granite trees, the hands of their branches like wet and muddy sterling where the Monastery walls melt into rock, the black bead eyes of the monks in taupe and tan observe both men.


	25. Chapter 25

Chapter Twenty-Five: In Other Words, Pachisi

"Hello, Mister Harkness. Shall I get you a chaser to go with that shiner, or can we make do with a jelly baby?"

Jack opens his eyes to a crinkly white blob. It crunches before his face in a Vaseline haze.

Also, the warmth of cinnamon, a dash of rough peppery clove. A touch of old lace, creamy with the stench of old tea times- sugared, stained, and too many butter curls spilled by tiny hands.

Suddenly, suddenly, softly and slowly, shapes emerge between blinkings.

From the slightly gaunt frame of a heart-shaped face, golden curls dangle heavily, like the languid heads of lilacs captured by little girls in their Easter dresses.

There are moorings all around the single green room through the only inside door, too. Body-shaped moorings. Two are female, one has a diamond-shaped head. Three are male, one being a child about ten years of age. All but one crèche is filled. One of them, Jack notes, is about 181 centimetres tall, just the right fit for a callous murderer in a camel coat.

Inside those, darkened shapes like potato sacks hang limp within silvery insets that feed out in purple and blue and black and red, all the way to the center console, where strange hand-shapes on console readers beckon the touch.

A set of long fingers dabbles near his eyelashes; between two tips of fingers there lies a sticky baby of red candy which flickers in and out off the bridge of his nose. Another one perches above Green Coat's lower lip, like a skin diver, this one orange and half-denuded of sugar crystals by the man's saliva.

"Don't talk to me like I'm stupid," Jack says, settling into a wolfish crouch where his back mingles upside down with a slanted row of inset wiring half-hanging out from the rather unflattering black wall behind him. "… I know you are behind all this."

Instantly, Green Coat's bony boxy quiet screaming shoulders are expressive again, dipping down for a preamble ski run like chariots of fire where he stands with his front to the main middle console- a hyper-modern pedestal cut of odd material in that same dismal blue and black and purple and red, circled by gold and purple sepulchers where one is, if Jack is not mistaken, to place one's hands. There, a white pyramid sits and spins in mid air above the very center, parading itself. The bounce as it hovers must be recent, because Green Coat keeps reaching up as if to touch, then remembers himself, hiding his lacy fingers deep again in a pensive velvet pocket.

"Do you really think so, Jack? Is that what you truly think of me?" Green Coat murmurs, the usual buttery timbre of his voice caught between what seems to be some rocks and a small spider web, because it surely sounds to Jack as though the real man who looks like this would never bend.

"Yes, Benjamin, I do." Jack says, curling his lips away from his teeth in a pearly rictus, "… It figures the best lay I ever had would be a murderer with Martian ice in his veins."


	26. Chapter 26

Chapter Twenty-Six: To Seek a Bird's Nest

Flashback.

The first face to greet the Doctor is not yet carved from that grand and lingering vision of Monastery stone. Rather, Roda Palfour's comely thin face is smooth as alabaster, and hairless as a child newly born. In youthful-seeming bird foot hands uncurled and swell-knuckled and unlined, he takes the pale slightly-reddened fingers of the Time Lord in his own and steals a breath from the aether at what he finds there, looking down with blue-chipped eyes of rainy, overcast sky.

"Brother, your hands tell me things." Roda says evenly, chirping flat and pleasing words with what might be a human tongue, were it not jewel-black, and wet-glistening and sharp like the leaves of a peppery Crassulaceae.

The Doctor sighs, allowing some air to slip passed his lips and touch the monk's elongate, stretched-bird face.

"It –has- been a long time, hasn't it, Roda? Is he here?" he says, chewing on a bit of thick leaf he found full of water and growing in the chalcedony sea. A dribble of liquid squirts down his chin, and is noticed without mention.

Roda's grave-set eyes sink further, then pop out and swirl around like a puppy at play. He shakes his bone-white bird-head, his lengthy muk-a-luk beak flowing like a long and tapered cornucopia from side to side. Then he looks up again, and those blue chips settle in the layers of pale green dust coating the Doctor's face.

"Hrm, I didn't think so. Well, my old friend, I shan't be staying long- just a bit of rest and then I have to see a man about a body."

"You must be tired. We will prepare a bed and food for you- but you should have come in the Flesh." Roda murmurs, casting blue eyes across the green sea and its salty shore behind him.

The Doctor grins, blinks dusty eyes. Thinks and smiles and sighs for a moment or two. Shuffles his feet in the sea green dust. With a falsified yawn, he bows his rabbit head a little, but then it drifts back up again with a laugh on its lips.

"Ha, Roda, Roda, Roda. What gave us away?"

The bird-man smiles his long smile inside and outside of a toothless line, his features pulled slightly out of focus like a taffy denture.

"Your gait. You were stumbling, dear boy. Your choice of mechanism gave you to me, Oh Father of the Sand Before Her Wedding Day."

The Doctor reaches down and shoves aside his long dust cloak, revealing the slim pronouncement of his pregnant belly.

Roda's hands reach for the bulge, probing the air with gnarly digits, to press and curl and cup.

His smile dims a little, shortens a little, and the lines of his avian face draw in.

"Had you been able to arrive sooner, we might have glimpsed our Teacher's face once more. As it is, please enter into the Monastery, and we will tend to you. Your friend with storm cloud eyes may come as well, I take it?"

Roda's long arm unfolds like a space rigger's rotary docking claw, so slowly. With it, the bird-man envelops the horizon in a curving line of sinew, the fingers of his long, long hand eventually growing outward and back, leaving one solid digit pointing sharp as a stick at Jack Harkness.

The Time Agent is standing half-shadowed behind one of the chocolate granite trees; he steps out into the light, barefoot, dusty. Just as dusty as the man he's come to find, the sea having chewed and swallowed his shoes for his ignorance.

The Doctor turns once, just once, and sets eyes upon Jack Harkness' eyes. There comes a quick silence, and then…

"You might still see that face, Roda Palfour," the Time Lord says, covering himself again as he messes with a flash of gold near his finger and leans on Roda, while the smaller hands of another younger monk remove his black boots, undoing the laces carefully. "You might still indeed… in fact, I think… oh that hurts. Ow."

His hands grasp at his stomach in the tall bird-man's arms, dragging them both down in a mess of tan and taupe and greenish cloak.

Roda's gasp breaks Jack out of it.

"Brothers and Sisters, get him inside! I don't care what he's done!" Roda calls, his face and voice etched with new lines like a burst balloon as he struggles under the Doctor's weight, his eyes narrow and wide at once s he looks down at his charge of the minute.

But Jack will have nothing of this.

He cries out and runs full into the sudden blow of green, racing against the churning dust storm sauntering at the edges of his vision to reach the Time Lord before he can enter the Monastery, "Not so fast; this bastard's not gaining any sanctuary here!"

"Just… try it, Jack…" the Time Lord croaks, closing his eyes a moment before finishing the thought, his new gaze opening on the leather strap around Jack's wrist, "… the dust has got into your ride. Have to… use mine, if you can... override... autopilot. It's set for Gallifrey. If not, we both…" He sags.

Blue eyes fire solar flares back the way they both have come.

"Well I have to, don't I, Benjamin? Duty calls." Jack smirks as he jerks Benjamin up by the arm.

"I'm going to override your autopilot, and then you'll be done running for good."

To Be Continued In:

Rescue From Without


End file.
